Posted
by
timothyon Thursday September 02, 2010 @02:39PM
from the boil-the-marketing-folks-in-goo dept.

pickens writes "David Pogue writes in the NY Times that when you buy a new Windows PC, it comes festooned with stickers on the palm rests: one for Windows, one for Skype, one for Intel, one for the laptop company, maybe an Energy Star sticker and so on. 'It's like buying a new, luxury car — and discovering that it comes with non-removable bumper stickers that promote the motor oil, the floor mat maker, the windshield-fluid company and the pine tree air freshener you have no intention of ever using,' writes Pogue. But the worst thing is that when you peel them off, they shred, leaving adhesive crud behind. 'When you've just spent big bucks on a laptop, should you really be obligated to spend the first 20 minutes trying to dissolve away the sticker goop with WD40?' But AMD has a solution. Starting next year, AMD will switch to new stickers that peel off easily, leaving no residue; after that, it's considering eliminating the sticker program altogether."

We're just as a part of nature as bees and lemon trees, so why is stuff we made suddenly unnatural?

Mainly because our minds can invent new things faster than our bodies can adapt to them, thus something invented by us is more likely to cause serious trouble for our metabolism than something that bees or trees invented millions of years ago.

thus something invented by us is more likely to cause serious trouble for our metabolism than something that bees or trees invented millions of years ago.

I've got some foxglove growing out in my yard if you want to test that theory.. And if you survive that, there's a local amanita variant I can probably find without too much trouble if I go looking for it.

Modern staple foods are almost universally descended from plants that were deliberately exposed to high levels of artificial ionizing radiation or chemical mutagens in order to induce mutations. Mankind induced the mutations, then mankind artificially and selectively bred the mutations into the food supply. Outside a few minor heirloom varieties, there is virtually no maize, wheat, rice, or soy on the planet which isn't the result of these artificially-induced alterations of the plant genomes.

Which is to say, no, there is almost nothing you can eat "which is part of the ecosystem without human intervention." It's all been meddled with.

These days most of the babies used to make baby oil are kept in cages and fed a genetically-engineered diet which is designed to greatly boost the production of the fats which most of the oil is squeezed from. So it's not really "natural" anymore; as they saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.

If you can, try to find baby oil which is squeezed from organic free range babies. It has a much higher quality due to the more varied diets and additional nutrients they get from natural foraging behaviour; however it's a fair bit more expensive and many stores don't carry it at all. I think the average free range baby yields about 3 litres of baby oil when squeezed; you get around 10L from a battery-farm baby.

Watch out for glossy "piano finish" surfaces like found around many newer TVs, monitors, and laptops. Goo Gone will actually smear the glossy surface as well as remove any gunk, leaving you with basically melted plastic that hardens into dull rough matte plastic after a short while.
My 46" LCD looks great after I removed some stupid sticker from the side of it::rolls eyes::

Peel off as much of the sticker as you can, preferably until there's just a schmutz of glue left, then rub your finger on the side of your nose and use that to loosen the rest of the glue. After a little rubbing, you can wipe it all away with a cloth or towel.

It's free, all-natural, always handy, and something you want to get rid of anyway.

I hate stickers with an OCD fervor, so I have become an expert at removing them. I have found that one of the most effective methods is to use the adhesive itself--most of the time when you peel a sticker off, some of the adhesive stays on the sticker. If you put that patch on the adhesive that stayed on the surface and make a small twisting motion, you can remove the residue quickly and without solvents or much heat build up.

Nooo! It contains acetone or ethyl acetate, both of which are good solvents for most kinds of plastic, like your laptop handrest. It can seriously f%$# up the surface, making it look worse than with stickers.

Jojoba oil. Expensive, but a little dab 'l do ya.
Also, natural, sustainable and sometimes "organic".
Most retail jojoba is "cosmetic grade" so it shouldn't
bother your skin either. In fact, it's chemicly similar
to the oils that come out of your skin anyway.

I haven't actually tried it on laptop stickers; but it
does an excellent job of emulsifying the fat/charcoal combination
you get from your gril. It also lubed a sticky pantry door latch
for at least a year now, with just one drop. It would be brilli

Blow dryer is the best. Melts the glue and no residue. My dad is a truck driver and this is what he use to use to remove the decals when he switched companies. Works for every sticker I have ever tried so far.

When I lived in Tahoe, we would go up to Boreal Ski Area in the late afternoon and ask the people leaving for their tickets. Crank the heater up in the truck and put the ticket+wicket over the heat for a few minutes and you could peel it right off and stick it on a new wicket and ride for free when the mountain was open at night.

I'm sure that by now they use those perforated tickets, so probably not feasible anymore. Good times while they lasted.

I was working in the lab once and need to remove some stickers. A colleague made your suggestion about a hair dryer. We didn't have a hair dryer, but we did have a heat gun (for shrink wrapping stuff). It turns out that a heat gun will melt your monitor about two seconds after it gets the stickers hot enough to slide off.

Not on laptop stickers. In fact, using the term "sticker" is misleading. They're superglued on badges that are usually impossible to remove without damaging your finish. I've seen intel badges that were practically structural elements.

I have a mac because I like UNIX and I like native versions of common software packages that I actually enjoy using without having to resort to a compatibility layer. That's worth a premium to me.

i.e. Photoshop and Logic Audio

That and the proprietary Apple API's and subsystems are actually pretty good. I like Core MIDI and Core Audio for example. And for multimedia/creative work, Apple's GUI layer is far more capable than X. Native PDF output from any app is neat as well. System-wide spellchecking tha

Don't get me wrong, I think Mac OS X is a great OS. And I use it. On "PC hardware" actually (whatever that means... because really it's the same, except for the SMC chip). I don't think I mentioned anything about their software, which is what your post is about. I mention their hardware. +$500 for a RAM upgrade when the same component can be bought for +$150 is killing me. Yes it is. That's just raping my ass. No matter how good the OS is.

3) Pray that all the features of the laptop are supported under Linux (not a troll - I have a Toshiba NB 205 Netbook that I'd love to run Linux on but there isn't a single distribution out there that supports all the features, at least not reliably or without heroic efforts)

I switched to Mac in 2001 because I could run the entire LAMP stack without emulation or dual-booting and access it from a commandline and whatever GUI tools while being able to run apps like Creative Suite that were a 100% requirement. That's something you can't do on either Linux or Windows. And that's what I paid for. Nice looks, good UI and lightweight form-factor are all just icing on the cake.

No problem with Lenovo either. At least not on the Thinkpad I have.Just one "Intel Centrino 2" sticker that I don't mind leaving on. It's got that nice holographic part that changes colors as you view it from different angles, and it's small.

I often leave stickers on things as long as they look clean - it makes me feel like it's still new! I suppose leaving them on longer makes them harder to remove once I do decide to remove them though.

I thought it was going to be about how they don't like people to put t

I suppose leaving them on longer makes them harder to remove once I do decide to remove them though.

From my own experience I would say no. Eventually the adhesive will lose its grip entirely and the sticker will slide off. From what I've seen, when that happens the sticker tends to take all the adhesive with it, leaving pretty much no mess.

If the vendors were clever, they'd probably chose an adhesive that would release right around when your warranty expires...

Agreed. The reason WD40, baby oil, and rubbing alcohol all work great (as opposed to water) is because they are much more non-polar than water and dissolve the adhesives and other goop from the stickers much more easily. Anyone remember "like dissolves like" from general chemistry?

Rubbing alcohol is my preferred goop cleaner because, as the parent says, it's cheap and lasts for years.

Unless you have a laptop with a lacquered finish where the rubbing alcohol will affect the lacquer, which will either lose its lustre, or start peeling off three months down the road due to your alcohol abuse today.

IME, the best thing to use to remove residual glue is the sticker itself. Press it back on, lift, repeat until all the glue is gone.

And if you put it in a spray bottle (99 cents) and mix it with a lighter (another 99 cents) you've got hours and hours of entertainment! The fire is relatively low-temperature, so you can do stupid shit like put some on your hand and light it. Burns really cleanly too, so it doesn't set off most fire alarms.

And if you put some rubbing alcohol into one of those 5 gallon drums, shake it up to disperse the stuff well, then drop a match into the throat you'll get a pretty awesome gout of flame. Just, you know, make sure you're not aiming it at anything you care about.

It makes sense, but aren't the ones who add the stickers the manufacturers? Also, I assumed the stickers were there by the request of the component manufacturers, how can they be so easily "eliminated"?

Note: yes, I'm aware that most nerds won't be affected by this...but it will certainly confuse some normal folk, I guarantee it.

Nah. Most normal folk don't even know what companies do what. Sure, they've probably heard the names Intel and AMD... And maybe even know that they both make processors... And maybe they've even noticed that you typically only have one or the other on a box... But normal folk aren't even going to ponder why they've now got both on a box. They'll just buy the machine with the most gigawhosits and call it done.

No, normal folk will have no idea what AMD is and will think, rightly, that it must refer to some magical component inside the computer.They only vaguely know that Intel has something to do with people in clean-room bunny suits.

Those Apple logos are no more advertising than are the "Jesus loves you" bumper stickers on the car of a born-again Christian. If you own an Apple product how could you possibly not want to tell the world about it? Think of the souls you might save!

They mention that in the article, and it makes sense given how controlling Apple/Jobs is about product look and feel. Why spend thousands of man hours researching design if you are just going to gum it up with stickers almost as an afterthought. For the most part I don't mind the Intel sticker, but the rest do bug me. I appreciate my Macbook Pro being clean from the get-go.

Wow great! So I can buy a shiny new laptop and not have to spend the first twenty minutes of its life removing the ugly mess of stickers that the manufacturer seems obliged to festoon upon its creation? Or no, I just have one fewer to remove because AMD is just one company (or two, I suppose, depending on the motherboard chipset and graphics subsystem). So all that would be left for many is that ugly "Windows" sticker...

Wonder if AMD will do anything about that? Sure would be nice to be able to buy a shiny new laptop and not have to spend the first hours of its new life formatting and loading an operating system that doesn't suck.

Ah, who am I kidding? It could come loaded with the latest and greatest uber-Ubuntu and I'd still reload it just because it's not partitioned the way I want it...

Horseshit. If you *think* you're a geek guy and you don't have a handful of random solvents in your garage/basement/car trunk/etc then you need to reconsider your claim to geekdom. Solvents are right up there with pencils, duct tape, and string as must-have accessories.

This is one place where apple really shines. You buy a new machine, it comes with no stickers on it. It looks really sleek. No stickers, nice clean lines, really helps the machine look nice. I don't know why none of the PC makers can do this. Make a machine that is esthetically pleasing, and don't mess it up with stickers.
Also, does anybody find it odd how they related it to cars? When you buy a car, it has the manufacturer's logo, possibly a hood ornament, the type of car (sunbird, tempo, Ranger), the model of the car (SX,ZX,whatever). Also you get the dealership slapping their name on it too. Often the dealer will not only put their name on the body of the car, but also around the license plate. It's basically a billboard for the manufacturer and the dealership. I kind of equate it to buying a $50 t-shirt with some designer name printed across the front. Basically you're a walking billboard. I would love to be able to buy a car with no markings at all on it.

That's why I buy Apple, I hate branding so much that I am happy to report it came out of the package without stickers marking my allegiance to one company or another. It also comes with this cool light on the back in a funny shape that's not really useful, but I'm sure I'll figure it out its purpose someday. It's really cool, you guys should try it.

Are people really buying laptops that often that this becomes a significant time-suck? The last laptop I bought, I bought 8 or 9 years ago - and I still use it. I basically just let the stickers fall off on their own; over time they lost their hold and were lost to time.

Unfortunately the same applied to the rubber feet underneath the laptop; that was something that should have been affixed with a stronger adhesive. I'm still trying to find replacements for those little buggers...

How about all those logos before a video game starts? First we have the developer logo, then the publisher logl, then the graphics engine logo followed by the physics game logo, and then some legaleese. And then maybe a cutscene kicks into gear. I timed one video game (Bad Company 2, I think) and it was just over sixty seconds before I could even interact with the menu. I gotta give props to Fallout 3. Insert game. Press start. Alas, that's an exception.

I wouldn't mind a single technical information summary sticker on the underside of the laptop. You know, where the manufacturer typically puts a sticker with serial number, model number, etc.? Something which is sort of the computer equivalent of the 'nutrition facts' box on food packaging, which included info about:

Only thing is, I think putting all that info on a sticker, in text large enough to read, would lead to a giant sticker, which might interfere with things like removable batteries, removable access panels (e.g. the panel you normally remove to access the memory slots, etc), cooling vents, removable drives, etc, which are all usually accessed on the bottom of the laptop.

Perhaps the most annoying sticker placement I have ever encountered is on the mating surface of copper plumbing fittings. Makes a 10 second cleaning job into a five minute ordeal. Any other sad or funny stories?

Perhaps you could look at business laptops, generally they only come with 1 or 2 stickers

1 for the Chipset/Processorother for the OS(If it was included)

and, removing the stickers on thinkpads is extremely easy, run Prime 95 + Furmark for 15-20 minutes, use TPFC to disable the fan. Soon the sticker area heats up enough that you can just peel it off with minimal residue..

And, its unlikely that a short burst of high temp's will damage the processor in any way

AMD/ATI is better, AMD always has been and ATI has been kicking ass with their 5000 series cards. Unless you're going for absolute, price is not an issue performance, then AMD has intel soundly beaten.